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Aiming for Truly Sustainable Buildings

Perry Greenspan, a resident at Village Green condominium since 2010, decided to buy a two-bedroom there after happening upon the building site and checking out a model unit.Credit
Brad Harris for The New York Times

Over the last decade, the most widely recognized seal of approval for green buildings among New York City buyers has been LEED, a label that stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

Many property developers strive for LEED certification to appeal to residents with an image of eco-friendliness, as well as to charge premium prices and earn tax credits. Building features like LED lights, solar shades, recycled cabinets and flooring, rainwater irrigation systems, solar thermal heat tubes and green roofs are becoming more common. But some builders want to raise the bar higher, arguing that although LEED — ranked from certified, silver and gold to the most eco-friendly platinum — may be a good start, truly sustainable buildings should be the goal.

“We made a commitment almost seven years ago to start working on innovative construction and making sustainable buildings, so that it becomes the default way to build,” said Michael Namer, the chief executive of Alfa Development, which is halfway through developing its “Green Collection,” four condominium buildings seeking LEED gold certification that also include green elements not required by LEED.

Alfa’s first condominium, Village Green, which was developed in 2008, achieved LEED gold with features like Energy Star appliances, low-water-flow fixtures, recycled content, low-emission paints and sealants, and motion sensors controlling lighting in common areas.

Chelsea Green also offered buyers induction cooktops, which are flameless and cook by means of a magnetic field. Although they are more efficient and generally produce fewer greenhouse gases than gas stoves, most buyers apparently aren’t ready to go quite that green, Mr. Namer said, and about two-thirds have chosen the more traditional gas stoves. “Going forward,” he added, “we’re looking at whether we might discontinue the induction.”

Chelsea Green, along with Alfa’s two newest buildings, Village Green West and 199 Mott, which are currently being marketed, will use solar thermal heat tubes for 50 to 65 percent of the water supply. All buildings in the Green Collection have green roofs and use rainwater collection to irrigate plants, and buyers will be encouraged to use a drip irrigation system to water their own plants, Mr. Namer said.He even designed a rudimentary geothermal system to heat and cool some common areas in the newer buildings.

Geothermal energy systems, which remain relatively uncommon in the city, use the constant temperature of the earth to heat and cool buildings. Typically they involve digging expensive wells, but Mr. Namer uses tubing commonly found in radiant-floor heating and runs it under the building’s foundation, where the temperature is about 70 degrees. Water is pumped through the tubing, and then an air handler produces 70-degree air, which cools in the summer or heats in the winter.

The system was not only cheaper to install than conventional heating and cooling systems, but will also save money in the long run, Mr. Namer said. “If I’m spending $100 on the system with regular air handlers and condensing unit, I will be spending maybe $4 now, so it’s a big savings.”

Mr. Namer said Alfa had not sought platinum, the highest level of LEED certification, because of the demanding nature of that standard.

Perry Greenspan, a resident of Village Green since 2010, said she had found her two-bedroom after walking by the building site and then checking out a model unit. “I just thought it was beautifully done,” she said of Village Green, which is at 311 East 11th Street. “One of the reasons I wasn’t looking at new buildings is because they were all kind of large and sterile, but this one just felt like they’d put time into it, and thought about it, and they were really looking to build something that would last.”

Ms. Greenspan declined to say what she paid for her unit, but Mr. Namer says prices at Village Green, which started at about $1,100 a square foot in 2009, have nearly doubled, to $2,000 a square foot, partly because of the eco-friendly features. Some studies have shown that builders can charge a significant premium in rents or sales prices for environmentally sensitive buildings — as much as 24 percent.

Photo

The Village Green has a green roof and uses rainwater collection to irrigate plants.Credit
Brad Harris for The New York Times

While many developers continue to covet a LEED designation, others are trying to redefine what it is to be green. A growing list of eco-friendly construction technologies is enabling builders to go beyond LEED, and has helped introduce two even stricter green systems, namely the Living Building Challenge and passive housing.

The Green Building Council, which runs the LEED program, embraces these other certification systems, because they “help people stretch their thinking in terms of what’s possible with building,” said Scot Horst, a senior vice president with the council. “My sense is each of these certification tools has its own place in terms of helping to understand how to make a building function better with nature and people, and make it a healthier place.”

The council plans to modify LEED standards this month to move closer to more stringent certification systems. “Even LEED platinum still costs the planet,” said Abel B’Hahn, a former builder who is renovating an Upper West Side brownstone that he hopes will achieve the Living Building Challenge. “Even if we turned all of our existing buildings and all of our new buildings to LEED platinum, it’s still not sustainable.”

The Living Building Challenge certification system, developed by the International Living Future Institute in Seattle, requires features like net-zero water usage, meaning that the building must produce all the water it uses (through rainwater collection, for instance). While LEED certifies the design of green buildings, the Living Building Challenge scrutinizes how buildings actually perform, gauging their effect on the environment and measuring their performance a year after construction. In New York City, the Living Building Challenge is a true test, because net-zero water usage is next to impossible to achieve in buildings connected to water and sewer lines — and connection is required by city building codes.

But because the Living Building Challenge is as much a learning process as it is a certification system, as long as builders make an effort to try to change outdated government regulations, their buildings can still meet certification requirements, said Amanda Sturgeon, a vice president of the Living Building Challenge.

Mr. B’Hahn said he was prepared to push for regulatory change. “The sort of people who are going to have the money to buy a place like this are going to be looking for style, comfort and top-quality materials,” he said. “I intend to demonstrate that you don’t have to compromise at all on those qualities when designing some place that’s sustainable.”

The Living Building Challenge emphasizes beauty, spirit and inspiration as much as it does quantifiable results, but another exacting standard, called “passive house,” focuses solely on energy use — the building’s most significant environmental impact. Buildings consume about 40 percent of the world’s primary energy and are responsible for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the Rockefeller Institute and DB Climate Change Advisors.

Those percentages are closer to 75 percent in New York City, said Ken Levenson, the president of NY Passive House, a group that promotes passive housing.

Passive, or “zero energy,” houses maintain a comfortable interior climate without active heating and cooling systems. They use super-insulated building envelopes, energy recovery ventilators that exchange interior and exterior air and energy-saving appliances. A passive house uses less than a quarter of the energy of a traditionally powered home, according to the Passivhaus Institut, which developed the standard in Darmstadt, Germany.

Germany has thousands of passive houses, while New York City has about a dozen finished or in the works. Constructing a passive house in the United States can add as much as 6 percent to the total cost, but that number is coming down as more passive-housing products are being imported, Mr. Levenson said. For instance, the cost of the triple-pane windows used in passive housing has fallen by as much as 30 percent in the last two years, he said.

Courtney Perry has lived since earlier this year in an apartment house built to passive-house standards at 96 St. Marks Avenue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. She found her two-bedroom apartment during a routine search and “fell in love with the building first, before really understanding the benefits of passive house.”

“But it’s been excellent icing on the cake,” said Ms. Perry, who has monthly energy bills in the double digits, when other New Yorkers are paying hundreds of dollars. She says she also enjoys the quiet in her apartment, achieved with triple-pane windows and heavy-duty insulation.

Brendan Aguayo, who was one of the builders of 96 St. Marks, said he had seen green homes get premiums of 5 to 30 percent. Units at 96 St. Marks sold for about $975 a square foot, now the going rate in Prospect Heights. Mr. Aguayo said he was unsure whether the building’s greenness raised prices.

Despite the lack of a clear price incentive, Mr. Aguayo said he would again go beyond LEED in his next condo, in Boerum Hill, to the same stringent passive-house standard. “Once you start doing it,” he said, “you realize it really has to be more about a passion than financial gain.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 3, 2013, on page RE1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Deeper Shade of Green. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe